Abstract

Food security has been and continues to be a top priority for policymakers in a world of transformations. Even though featuring high on the agenda, insufficient progress has been made on the corresponding Millennium Development Goal in Subsaharan Africa, Southern and Western Asia and Oceania. Furthermore, increasing population and changing environmental conditions exacerbate the challenge of ensuring food security. In the long run, climate change will continue to add to this and - in addition - affect different parts of the world asymmetrically. Finally, food security is not a goal to be achieved in isolation of other factors: in fact, it is at the centre if a number of trade-offs involving issues ranging over bioenergy provision, preservation of forests and biodiversity and competition with other land uses. It is also closely linked to other resources, which are turning increasingly scarce, the prime example being water. However, while there is a common understanding of all these pressures, they remain surrounded by uncertainty and so are the socio-economic and climate scenarios, which we use to prepare strategies for achieving food security in concert with other goals. Zooming into such scenarios and their implications shows that we need to not only strive for resolving uncertainty, but also to explore robust solutions, which put us on a sustainable, yet flexible development path rather than locking us into scenarios, which we subjectively consider most likely in the face of incomplete information.